Determining keywords for optimum SEO

There is also a lot of information floating around the web regarding keywords and SEO; everything from technical jargon, misinformation, lies, and rumors. With all of that “information” floating around the web, it is at least worth noting that Google itself claims that their search engine algorithms are so complex that even the people who created them do not fully understand how they work. With all that being said, here are few helpful tips that can benefit your web outreach and SEO campaign.

Don’t fixate on meta-tag keywords only. Google essentially stopped using meta-tag keywords as factors in their website indexing in 2009.

Start with a link building strategy. Now more than ever, a well-planned link development strategy is essential to successfully achieve long-term search engine optimization results. Link development and website promotion provide new visitors to your website. Here is a simple way to understand the importance of a link building strategy, imagine that your website is an island. The only way to bring traffic to the island is by building bridges that connect the island to surrounding land mass. Without those bridges (in-bound links) then there would be no traffic coming to your island (website).

Link building is not about adding links from just any site; in fact, it’s the opposite. Not all links are created equal and are treated differently by search engines like Google and Bing. A link’s value is determined by trust, age of the domain linking to your site, what in-bound links do they have (website’s linking to their website), as well as various other factors that are proprietary to individual search engines.

Based on your link building strategy, you have the opportunity to focus on highly competitive terms with inherent high search volume, or moderately competitive short and medium-tail searches (which are known for their saturation ratios for any search conducted comprising any of the keywords that are optimized)

If your site is lean and mean, then competitive terms are a better bet, you need to funnel the right kind of traffic in order to make your online presence worthwhile.

If you are executing a pure content based ranking strategy (like several hundred pages in a blog) then you’re better off employing the long-tail approach (which means that any word on the page when paired with the right search modifier/search term, can return in a less competitive/more specific search query).

To do this, the logic is, to find the “most searched keywords” of the root phrases that are pivotal to your positioning strategy. For example, let’s say your company is a small pizza restaurant located in the suburbs of Cook County, Illinois. It would be more effective to write your website header that includes keywords like “Homemade Chicago Pizza” versus “Homemade Cook County Pizza”. Reason being that those people searching for homemade pizza in Chicago aren’t going to start their online search by typing in “Cook County Pizza”, they are going to search “Homemade Chicago Pizza”.

The next step is to identify the “most searched keywords”. Make sure your on page factors have enough saturation of the keywords. In the beginning of the campaign find 20 to 30 phrases with traffic, preferably terms that when reduced to their two word counterparts are high traffic terms, this way every time you build anchor text back to your pages using this combination of phrases or keywords, the entire group of keywords gets the lift and raises your sites all-in-anchor relevance for the entire lot of words. For example, keyword company, keyword services, local term keyword company, modifier reference, keyword, niche/modifier, etc.) over time you can wrap up an entire niche using this method.

Taking the suggested steps outlined above should provide great indexing results and great SEO.